F. W. J. Schelling - The Ages of the World (1811) (2019, State University of New York Press)

The Ages of the World (1811)

SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy ————— Dennis J. Schmidt, editor

The Ages of the World Book One: The Past (Original Version, 1811) Plus Supplementary Fragments, Including a Fragment from Book Two (the Present) along with a Fleeting Glimpse into the Future F. W. J. Schelling Translated and with an Introduction by Joseph P. Lawrence

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2019 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 1775–1854, author. | Lawrence, Joseph P., 1952– translator, writer of introduction. Title: The ages of the world : Book one : the past (original version, 1811) plus supplementary fragments (1811–1813), including a fragment from Book two (the present) along with a fleeting glimpse into the future / F. W. J. Schelling ; translated and with an introduction by Joseph P. Lawrence. Other titles: Weltalter. English Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2019] | Series: SUNY series in contemporary continental philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018027704 | ISBN 9781438474052 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438474076 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Ontology. Classification: LCC B2894.W42 E5 2019 | DDC 193—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018027704 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Bertel Thorvaldsen, Monument for Auguste Böhmer, 1814 (based on a design of F. W. J. Schelling dated April 25, 1811)

Contents Translator’s Introduction: The Ecstasy of Freedom 1 1. The Ages of the World (1811) Introduction 55 2. The Ages of the World (1811) Book One: The Past 65 Part One 65 Part Two 113 3. Notes and Fragments: To the First Book of The Ages of the World: The Past 169 4. Notes and Fragments: To the Second Book of The Ages of the World: The Present 219 Glossary 253 Index 263

1 Translator’s Introduction The Ecstasy of Freedom And I know what you will say now: That if truth is one thing to me and another thing to you, how will we choose which is truth? You don’t need to choose. The heart already knows. He didn’t have His Book written to be read by what must elect and choose, but by the heart, not by the wise of the earth because they don’t need it or maybe the wise no longer have any heart, but by the doomed and lowly of the earth who have nothing else to read with but the heart. —William Faulkner, Go Down Moses I. In the twelfth chapter of Book XI of the Confessions, Saint Augustine famously referred to a jester who, when asked, “What was God doing before he made heaven and earth?” replied facetiously, “he was preparing hell for those who dare to ask such questions.” Given that The Ages of the World (Die Weltalter) did dare to ask the question, one might consider the morass into which Schelling subsequently sank, in which he spent many years writing and rewriting a text that he never deemed publishable, as evidence that the jester was wiser than Augustine realized. There are certain questions, we are told often enough, that philosophy is not supposed to explore. Believing positivists and atheists say this just as decisively as do believing Christians—and for many of the same reasons. One wants to know, after all, what one thinks one knows, so much so that even philosophers find themselves unsettled by questioning that is truly radical. The fact that the Weltalter ended in failure might suggest

2 The Ages of the World that Schelling’s hubris was punished just as Augustine’s jester said it should be. If his goal was to show how primal nature could give birth to a self that actually merits the lofty title of “God,” he failed to accomplish it, try as he might. Imagining the contractions through which God was to give birth to himself was simply too much to bear: “For man helps man; even God helps him. But nothing can assist the primal being, lost in its terrifying solitude. It has no choice but to fight through its chaotic condition alone and by itself ” (WA 43).1 This, the image of a not-yet God himself undergoing hell, represents the only possible solution to the problem of why God would allow so much suffering in the world. To the degree that we are where God was, the affirmation of our need to suffer is a function of God’s own self-affirmation.2 The idea is coherent and, well understood, grants genuine solace (why would one ever want to pray to a god so “perfect” as to be incapable of empathy?). Even so, applied to the Father, it has consistently been rejected as heretical—despite the fact that the purported Son of God (and “no one can know the Father except through the Son”) was himself horrifically crucified, abandoned in his time of greatest need, and cast into hell. If Christianity has had to declare the very heart of Christianity heretical, it is presumably because its truth is too heavy to bear. Schelling’s great accomplishment is that, in an effort to philosophically ground a Christianity that would finally be Christian, he actually took the burden of such truth on himself. 1. The page numbers refer to the original German text that can be found in F. W. J. Schelling, Die Weltalter. Fragmente. In den Urfassungen von 1811 und 1813, ed. Manfred Schröter (Munich: Biederstein, 1946). Henceforth WA. In the course of my translation, I include the page number of the Schröter edition together with the page number of the original printing. 2. The problem of evil is explored, of course, in Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom from 1809. The best translation is by Priscilla Hayden-Roy and can be found in Fichte, Jacobi, and Schelling, Philosophy of German Idealism, ed. Ernst Behler (New York: Continuum, 1987), 217–84. To the degree that we are mired in evil, “God” is for us no more than a future possibility. We are where God was. Were this not the case, we would be praying to a God who (like the God of Aristotle) could not possibly understand our plight. From our perspective, God would have to listen in on us from the future, making him, her, or it quite helpless to jump in and take care of our problems. As Schelling put it already in 1800, first with a successful completion of human history (hardly a guaranteed thing!) would one be able to say “God also will then exist.” System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), 212.

Translator’s Introduction 3 Eighteen-eleven was the year of his solitude, when, still in mourning after the death of his wife Caroline, he completed his first version of a text that he was condemned to write and rewrite for much of the following decade. It is in many respects the strangest version of what has always been regarded as a strange project: an exploration of the primordial past, the disclosure of the hell that God had to climb out of in order first to become God, a hell that those any less than divine still have to struggle with.3 What makes this version stranger than the later versions is that, unique among philosophical texts, it seems to have been written solely from the heart, and, just as those ancient scriptures that Faulkner calls “His Book,” written for the heart. It is the work of a man in deep sorrow who expresses his hope that the anger and hatred so generally evoked by suffering can be transformed into compassion and love. Not that the text is void of argument or logic. Indeed, it represents Schelling’s first clearly stated intent to develop a logic of his own.4 But what a strange logic, one that ties the very act of predication to the mysteries of the dark ground, whereby “x is y” really means, “that which is x is that which is y.” Sheared of predicates of its own, the ground of unity (“that which is”) is ensnared in darkness, where it is mysteriously joined to the heart. To speak (or sing)5 its truth is to lighten its burden through “the generation of sound and meaning out of an interior so full that it can no longer remain in itself ” (WA 57). 3. Such language has to be taken, of course, with a grain of salt. As Sean McGrath points out, “we should not cling too tightly to the image of a prelapsarian state of being ‘prior’ to the creation of the world, rather, we should understand that the inside of every moment is a timeless ground that can only appear always as past.” See S. J. McGrath, Research in Phenomenology 40 (2010): 77. 4. The corresponding passage in Schelling can be found from 26/47 to 29/53. Wolfram Hogrebe makes use of this passage to develop a reading of the Weltalter as a theory of emergent discursivity in Prädikation und Genesis: Metaphysik als Fundamentalheuristik im Ausgang von Schellings “Die Weltalter” (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987). In a recent book, Manfred Frank has built off of Hogrebe’s work to provide a detailed account of Schelling’s implicit logical system, placing his emphasis, however, on the earlier philosophy of identity rather than the Ages of the World. In particular, he uncovers the debt Schelling may have owed to Gottfried Ploucquet, his logic teacher in the Tübingen Stift. See Manfred Frank, “Reduplikative Identität”: Der Schlüssel zu Schellings reifer Philosophie (Schellingiana: Band 28) (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Fromann-Holzboog Verlag, 2018), 165–71. 5. The German word for proposition is Satz—the same word that is used to depict a musical phrase. Schelling binds the two meanings together when he parallels a philosopher’s need to command logic with a musician’s need to command the rules of musical composition (WA 28).

4 The Ages of the World Many commentators have referred to the Weltalter not simply as a failure, but as the most spectacular failure in the history of philosophy. It is easy to see why. In 1810, after having earned the title of Europe’s most prolific philosopher, Schelling began working on the project, which he conceived as his magnum opus, to be delivered in three separate books, The Past, The Present, and The Future. He initially planned to have the work published in its entirety by Easter 1812, a date chosen to signal that his book about time is always also a book about the mysterious dialectic of death and resurrection that makes time possible. By Easter of the previous year, it appeared that he was well on schedule, having asked his publisher to set into print the version of The Past found here. During the interim, while the publisher did the hard work of deciphering Schelling’s handwritten manuscript and setting the type for the printing, Schelling began work on The Present (a sizable fragment of which is included in this volume). Unfortunately, apparently while working on the corrections of his proofs, he decided to rescind the publication and start over from the beginning. It was a pattern that kept recurring for the rest of the decade. During the same years that Hegel, his erstwhile friend and collaborator, was fast gaining renown, Schelling remained stuck on the first of his three books, quite as if he himself had become ensnared in the great revolving wheel of the past that he struggled to depict. According to Horst Fuhrmans, one of the few scholars to have completed a thorough examination of both of the Schelling archives (in Munich and Berlin), some twenty completely different drafts of The Past could be found, together with scores of scattered fragments.6 What they all attempted to disclose was, mythically construed, the history of God’s becoming. Forged in the painful contractions of primordial nature, god-Cronus, driven by alternating waves of fear and greed, devours his children. But when the gentle son steps forth, even old Cronus becomes gentle (and for the first time truly the Father),7 affirming the world in 6. Horst Fuhrmans, Schellings Philosophie der Weltalter (Düsseldorf: Verlag L. Schwann, 1954), 200. 7. The story that was first told as Zeus overcoming Cronus by an act of power is first properly told as the son who captures the heart, rendering what was once a monster into a proper father. This I infer, at any rate, from a reading of Schelling’s discussion of the transition from the Greek to the Christian Trinity. (WA 68–69) The pivotal moment comes somewhat later when he writes, “The begetting of the Son through the power of the Father offers the first possibility of a real relationship. It is this moment that constitutes the first real beginning.” (WA 77)

Translator’s Introduction 5 what we still celebrate as the act of creation. Philosophically construed, what Schelling was looking for was a compelling alternative to the mechanical conception of time as something stretched out into infinity, with neither beginning nor end. His purpose in illuminating the abyss of the past was to uncover the origin of time itself. In the same way, his projected goal for a third book on the absolute future, one that he never even started to write, was to reveal the end of all things: time so fully articulated that it would serve as a mirror for the lucid purity of eternity. Caught between these poles is, of course, the world we now experience, the subject of what was to have been his second book, The Present. By 1815 Schelling succeeded in working out a compressed version of the organism of time in the form of the theory of potencies that Eric Voegelin referred to as “perhaps the profoundest piece of philosophical thought ever elaborated.”8 It is a judgment with which as a Schelling scholar I am happy enough to concur, though I would like to add to it a simple observation: profundity of thought may indeed take a theoretical form, but theory itself must be grounded in intuition. To think deeply requires a prior descent into the depths. This is why many have considered the 1811 version of the Weltalter to be more compelling than its later revisions. It is a text filled with such a depth of inexpressible meaning that it literally rewrote itself twenty times or more. If I have kept my eye fixed on what came first, most commentators have stayed focused on the failure of the project as a whole, searching for whatever mistake in thinking might have generated the pile of rejected manuscripts Fuhrmans found buried away in the archives. The failure is hard to deny. Schelling, the philosopher who as a young man published a significant work each and every year, was now, at the age of thirty-six, suddenly unable to publish. This is the remarkable fact that captures the imagination. From 1810, when he began writing, until 1833, when he completed his last Munich lecture on Das System der Weltalter, 9 Schelling stayed devoted to this one project. But to the eyes of the world, it came to nothing. Even the history of the physical manuscripts themselves seems to reinforce the impression of tragic failure that the name Weltalter has come to evoke. In a story first recounted in Manfred Schröter’s edition 8. Eric Voegelin, History of Political Ideas, vol. 7: New Order and Last Orientation, eds. Jurgen Gebhardt and Thomas Hollweck (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999). 9. System der Weltalter: Münchener Vorlesung 1827/28 in einer Nachschrift von Ernst von Lasaulx, ed. Siegbert Peetz (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1990).

6 The Ages of the World of the 1811 and 1813 versions of the text (WA vii), the entire Munich archive was destroyed in July 1944, when the university library went up in flames as the result of a three-day Allied bombing attack on the city. Had Schröter not already prepared his transcripts, everything would have been lost. The turmoil of the times (der Drang der Zeiten) that according to Schelling had given birth to the work in the first place (WA 24), had come back with a hitherto never encountered intensity. If Schelling conceived his project amid the turmoil of the Napoleonic war, the very folio pages on which he wrote were destined to be incinerated in a war that was far more extensive and far more brutal, thus underscoring his central intuition: time itself is born in turmoil. Buried in the heart of eternity is an irresolvable contradiction. And while its gradual unfolding is guided by the need for resolution, the warfare at its bottom never really goes away. Yes, everything is aimed at the future. Just as the tight density of an acorn unravels into a towering oak tree, all things live out the life of what Schelling calls the universal organism of the ages, a life guided always by the yearning for what religion has so quaintly and variously called the communion of saints and the heaven of the Bodhisattvas. It is a vision so clear that even secular reason has appropriated an abstract version of it (“the comity of nations and the universal state”)10 as its guiding ideal, often posturing as if the right balance of technology and enlightened political institutions will one day constitute the community of nations and thereby secure the happiness of humanity. But, as poets know so well, the eschaton of the future lives only in such imaginings, for it is precisely not a program to be achieved by political action and technological innovation. In itself, the absolute future, like the absolute past, is hidden away in eternity. Thus those stunning words that can be found in one of the fragments translated in this volume, words that Schelling later chose as the opening to the 1815 version of the Weltalter: “God in his wisdom (fürsichtig) hides in dark night not only the end of time to come but the beginning of time past” (WA 198 and 220). The “wisdom” of God is the knowledge that time, as fixed as it is in the form of a simple progression from past to present to future, is always held open by the concealment in eternity of its absolute beginning and end. As resolutely as Schelling attempted to 10. Schelling says emphatically that the highest thing that can be achieved in this way is a “mechanical conformity to law,” System of Transcendental Idealism, 212. True community is based on friendship and has, strictly speaking, no institutional correlate.

Translator’s Introduction 7 pry open the past, it always closed itself back again, in keeping with that infernal logic by which Napoleon abolished is yet the Hitler to come. It is a logic that Schelling on occasion endowed with the blessed name of wisdom. Recognizing it as such is the most difficult task facing humanity. Far from there being shame in the failure to complete the task, the failure itself is one of the secrets of divine wisdom: the compassionate heart is held open by the eternal return of the suffering it seeks to overcome. It is a difficult truth to be sure, but the difficult truths are the ones most worth mastering. II. It goes without saying that, despite the World War II destruction of the Munich archive, all was not lost. Indeed, the most fully developed version of the Weltalter (1815) had already been published shortly after Schelling’s death by his son, Karl Friedrich August von Schelling, for inclusion in Volume 8 of the Sämmtliche Werke. 11 It is followed by a philological essay, Über die Gottheiten von Samothrace. 12 Initially intended as an appendix to the completed Weltalter, Schelling himself had it published as an independent text in 1815, the rare exception to his otherwise unbroken silence. A reflection on the origins of Greek mythology, it caught the attention of the poet Goethe, who not only praised the work but made use of it in a most interesting fashion in Act 2 of Faust II. 13 It was the seed of the thirty-six lectures called the Philosophie der Mythologie, a version of which eventually made its way into the Sämmtliche Werke. In a letter written in 1822, Schelling announced a plan to publish the lectures as a prelude to the “soon to be completed” Weltalter, making it clear that the lectures can be considered as somehow belonging to Schelling’s initial project. But even without counting the mythology lectures, and despite the piles of manuscripts destroyed in the bombing attack, some 1,400 pages from the Weltalter proper are now available in German, including 11. F. W. J. Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. K. F. A. Schelling (Stuttgart-Augsburg: J. G. Cotta, 1856–1861), I/8, 195–344. Henceforth SW. 12. F. W. J. Schelling, Über die Gottheiten von Samothrace, SW I/8, 345–424. The best commentary I know on the work can be found in Kyriaki Goudeli, Challenges to German Idealism: Schelling, Fichte and Kant (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 13. I will tell a brief version of the story at the end of this introduction.

8 The Ages of the World a number of previously unknown fragments from the Berlin archive.14 The 1815 version published by Schelling’s son is still probably the best known. It has been twice translated into English.15 Given the editorial intrusions of Schelling’s son, however, who seems to have been more orthodox in his Christianity than his father, it is safe to say that the text is not fully reliable. Not only did Karl Friedrich add headings of his own, but a series of rather abrupt breaks suggests that he may have stitched together material from a variety of manuscripts. It thus matters that Schelling himself had been the one to prepare the two earlier drafts for publication. Whereas the “official” 1815 version is often hard to follow, both the 1811 and the 1813 versions, for all their obscurity, read quite well, almost as if they had been written in one fell swoop. The 1813 version was translated by Judith Norman and published in 1997.16 A translation of the 1811 version, long since rendered into Italian, French, and Spanish, is thus long overdue. Jason Wirth, in his introduction to his own translation of the 1815 Weltalter, called for its speedy translation as “the most dramatic in tone” of all of the known drafts.17 It is a tone I have tried hard to capture. As for the 1813 version, Norman’s translation was published together with a lengthy if rather fanciful introduction by Slavoj Žižek that, while doing little to illuminate the text, did a lot to bring Schelling into the limelight. Despite some serious disagreements with Žižek,18 I do think his general understanding of Schelling as the “vanishing mediator” between metaphysical and postmetaphysical thinking has a lot to be said for it. It is precisely because it accomplished the task of mediation that the work 14. Two substantial volumes of completed drafts and fragments were published in 2002 in Schellingiana, with more to come: Weltalter-Fragmente, ed. Klaus Grotsch (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Fromann-Holzboog, 2002), vols. 13.1 and 13.2). 15. F. W. J. Schelling: (1) Ages of the World, trans. Frederick de Wolfe Bolman, Jr. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942); (2) The Ages of the World, trans. Jason M. Wirth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). 16. F. W. J. Schelling, Ages of the World, trans. Judith Norman, in Slavoj Žižek/F. W. J. Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 17. “Translator’s Introduction,” in F. W. J. Schelling, The Ages of the World, trans. J. Wirth, viii. 18. I touch on a few of these disagreements below. For a much deeper discussion of Žižek’s attempt to “psychoanalyze” Schelling, I refer the reader to Sean J. McGrath, The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious (East Sussex, UK: Routledge, 2012), 25–32.

Translator’s Introduction 9 cannot be dismissed as a failure.19 Martin Heidegger made a similar point when he discerned in Schelling’s forty-five-year “silence” (Schelling published hardly anything of significance between his Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom from 1809 and his death in 1854) a foreshadowing of Nietzsche’s mental breakdown later in the nineteenth century, emphasizing that, despite such a clinical assessment, Schelling’s project was as little a failure as Nietzsche’s. It was, in fact, “nothing negative at all,” Heidegger wrote, but rather “the advent of something completely different, the heat lightning of a new beginning.”20 As to what that new beginning might be, the idea of hidden mediation is helpful. It is certainly true that an abyss separates metaphysical from postmetaphysical thinking. It is also true that Schelling, or more specifically the materialist in Schelling, was the one philosopher who wrote directly out of that abyss. On the one hand, he was the modern Plotinus, a Platonist through and through. On the other hand, he accomplished the task of creatively turning Plato inside out, reversing the theory of emanation so that the chorology21 hidden away in the Timaeus might triumph decisively over the last fading remnants of the “theory of ideas.” The same Schelling who had completed the system of identity was the Schelling who, with his insight into the “unprethinkability” of being, created modern existentialism. He is the one thinker who thought from both sides of the metaphysical divide. And as the twenty fully independent drafts of the Weltalter show so clearly, such thinking erases itself as quickly as is written. If Eric Voegelin discerned depth in Schelling’s theory of potencies, both Žižek and Heidegger hint at an even greater depth by suggesting that Schelling had uncovered an abyss from which he could only keep shrinking away, so that his every return to the task has to be understood 19. Because the work was not published in Schelling’s lifetime, the mediation occurred indirectly. When in 1841 Schelling was assigned Hegel’s chair in Berlin, intellectuals from all over Europe gathered together for what was one of the last great university events in history, deeply impacting the thinking of Marx, Engels, Feuerbach, Bakunin, Burkhardt, and Kierkegaard. For a stunning account of this entire period, see John Toews, Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 20. Martin Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985). 21. John Sallis, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). It is fully appropriate that Sallis ends his book on Plato with a protracted discussion of Schelling (155–67).

10 The Ages of the World as an act of tremendous courage. In this regard, Žižek was right to speak of “such an effort of thought it is almost painful to read.”22 Where I find myself still disagreeing substantially with Žižek is where he seems to suggest that that the abyss is singularly horrific, capable of fostering revolutionary fervor, but in no way serving to better the human soul. What Žižek saw and appreciated in the 1813 version of the Ages draft is its presentation of a series of spiraling crises that culminate in a sudden decisive act of freedom that brings everything to order, providing God with the drive and energy to create the world. This is clearly a compelling vision for a political theorist who has dedicated his life to reviving the Marxist hope that the crises of capitalism will end with a moment of revolutionary clarity and decision. Although I have to confess that my own hopes go in a similar direction, I find no need to represent creation as the production of something completely new. Instead of representing the transition from inaction to action, it represents the transition from action that is destructive and self-defeating to action that nurtures and gives birth to life. Instead of turning on an exasperated “something has to be done,” it turns on what is essentially a moment of recognition, akin to the Taoist recognition of what aboriginal peoples knew long before the forests were felled, divided into lots, and sold: a home can be found in wilderness, despite its terrors. Schelling would have understood Žižek’s zeal, but questioned his naiveté. As was already clear to him as a boy caught up in the fervor of the French Revolution, the political fantasy that a new world order could be established simply by replacing those in power is just that, a fantasy. What he offers as an alternative is the essentially religious hope that love might one day triumph over power itself. Žižek, of course, would presumably regard this as a fantasy far more preposterous than his own. Most anyone would agree. The idea is palatable only if love has an ontological grounding deeper than the sentimental wishes of human beings. What for me is most compelling about the 1811 Ages of the World is the degree to which the interplay of primal forces it depicts is directed not toward decisive action, but toward the transformation of fear into love, a transformation that occurs not as an act of will, but of relaxation, the resurgence of a primordial innocence older even than sin. If the abyss of freedom is the primordial coupling of madness and nothingness, the ecstasy of freedom 22. Slavoj Žižek/F. W. J. Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World, trans. Judith Norman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 4.

Translator’s Introduction 11 is the saving power implicit in that nothingness, a power that completes itself in love. It is in love, not the restrictive love of the particular but the ecstatic love of self-surrender, that the reality of the external world, until then experienced as an ever-shifting phantasmagoria, is constituted in what has traditionally been referred to as “the creation of the world.” In the world we live in today, a world that, as Žižek correctly observes, is driven by fear more and more in the direction of substituting virtual reality for the real, the possibility of achieving the transformation Schelling had in mind is something we need to take seriously. One does not have to gainsay any of the perils of life in the wild (and here Schelling often sounded more like Hobbes than Rousseau) to find inspiring the strength of soul that enabled primordial humanity to find a home in what more effete souls call darkness.23 Creation is more the reception of a gift than an act of construction and control. In stating my preference for the 1811 version, I am in part following Manfred Frank, whom I consider the most notable Schelling scholar in Germany. He chose the 1811 draft of the text for inclusion in his six-volume edition of Schelling’s Ausgewählte Schriften, thereby ranking it in importance even above the far better known (and often translated) essay on human freedom from 1809.24 But as long as I am following an authority, I cannot do better than to follow Schelling himself. What I have in mind is an uncharacteristically short and hurried letter that he wrote in the opening month of 1811 to his future wife Pauline Gotter.25 (Caroline had died two years earlier.) “I am picking up my pen,” Schelling began, “not so much to write to you as to explain why I do not write.” With that said, he revealed what was to be his tragic destiny: “A work I have long carried inside of me should soon see the light of day. I need to complete the finishing touches and am consumed by the work and effort it costs me. Nor is it easy to let go of what one has so long nurtured as a living whole. Separating oneself from such a work is painful, but it must be done. The first draft is usually the best.”26 23. Jason Wirth, Schelling’s Practice of the Wild (New York: State University of New York Press, 2015). If Wirth accents “the wild,” I would prefer to accent being “at home.” 24. F. W. J. Schelling, Ausgewählte Schriften, Bd. 4: 1807–1834), ed. Manfred Frank (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985), 9. 25. F. W. J. Schelling, Aus Schellings Leben, in Briefen, ed. Gustav Leopold Plitt (Leipzig: Hirzel Verlag, 1870), vol. 2, 244. 26. For reasons that I trust are obvious, I have added the emphasis.

12 The Ages of the World It was as if Schelling had a premonition of what was to play itself out over the following two decades. The importance of his work was something he so deeply felt that he could only be disappointed, over and over, at his inability to articulate it appropriately. What is so deeply felt can only be represented by a word that is fully alive. Schelling’s real endeavor was to teach philosophy the language of the heart. Thus, a few months after writing these words, Schelling had the first draft of the first book of the Weltalter set in print, but found that he was indeed unable to part with it. The idea he had unearthed was too deep, too rich in its implications for humanity, to be allowed to step out into the world in its rough-hewn shape. It deserved a better, a more transparent presentation. In 1813, Schelling had a second draft set in print and just as quickly withdrew it. After that came the slow steady descent into the inferno of the past. He produced one text after the other, but without finding anything worthy of that final separation that grants to a work a life independent of its author. What was supposed to carry him into an ecstatic vision of the future had become a trap from which he never fully emerged, a trap that only became more and more constricted with time. Schelling’s real “failure” was that he did not take sufficiently to heart the words he had written to Pauline: “the first draft is usually the best.” In unveiling an absolute that was tortured and fragile, he should not have demanded of himself a presentation that was polished and well-rounded. Even Socrates, according to the elegant Alcibiades, had the face of a satyr and spoke in words that were plain and roughhewn. Schelling should have gone forward with what he had. What is compelling about the 1811 draft of the Weltalter is not so much the theory one can take from it, as the poetic intensity of its language, the full-throated vitality of a spirit baptized in the fire of truth. The problem with such language, however, is that it cannot be heard where it most needs to be heard. Schelling’s dilemma was the dilemma of any prophet: the very urgency of the desire to communicate arises from the fact that no one wants to listen. To be heard by sleepwalkers, one must speak in a whisper. To wake them up, one must roar with the intensity of a lion. Accomplishing the two together is a formidable task. This is why the voice of prophecy is most urgent in a world that has declared it obsolete.

Translator’s Introduction 13 III. It is science that has rendered prophets a thing of the past. If Schelling’s project was in some sense that of resurrecting a forgotten voice, then, lest it be dismissed at the outset as an exercise in senseless speculation, its legitimacy must first of all be confirmed in the face of science itself. I have two things in mind when I say this. First, Schelling’s project has to be compatible with what science does in fact know about the world. Second, any fundamental critique it has of science has to at least make good sense. In raising this issue, it helps to remember, as historians of science may know, that Schelling, by way of his student Oersted, played a pivotal role in the turn of modern physics away from the mechanical view of the world toward the modern electro-dynamic view.27 In addition, together with Goethe, he developed a comprehensive theory of evolution well before Darwin,28 albeit one that, instead of being based on random variation, was teleological in conception. To a certain extent, the Weltalter was the culmination of Schelling’s wider attempt to universalize the evolutionary point of view. The importance of the confrontation with science was spelled out from the beginning of Schelling’s career, as can be gleaned from a quick look at The Oldest System Programme of German Idealism, an anonymous piece of writing that Schelling seems to have composed in collaboration with Hegel and Hölderlin, his roommates and fellow theology students in the Tübingen Stift.29 The short text opens with the idea that a new metaphysics must be constructed from the standpoint of practical rather than theoretical reason. This by itself would usher in a new physics, one 27. Brian L. Silver, The Ascent of Science (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000). 28. The relationship between Goethe, Schelling, and Darwin is explored in Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe, Science and Its Conceptual Foundations Series (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 29. I will follow the lead of David Krell and simply point out that the text is easy to find, given that it is included in any basic anthology of either Hegel or Hölderlin, or Schelling. One thing is undeniable: the language is all Schelling. See David Farrell Krell, The Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing of God (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). Krell’s book is noteworthy for the attention it gives specifically to the 1811 Ages of the World.

14 The Ages of the World that will have “wings again.” The key to it is to begin by asking what nature must be if moral beings have arisen out of it. The question occurs in direct opposition to an epistemology that lets something count as knowable only if a mechanical model of it can be constructed. To start with such an epistemology is to guarantee at the outset the clockwork view of the universe that cannot but make freedom appear as an aberration from nature, if not a total illusion. What the young Schelling would have us realize is that the only access science has to the world is that which is given within the field of self-conscious experience. The universe, which many scientists would like to understand as the objectively real thing they have set out to investigate, is just as much an abstraction from experience as the spirit is for the theologically inclined. As Kant showed so clearly, the price science must pay for the objectivity of knowledge is that it can only issue proclamations about the objects of experience. It has nothing to say about such issues as whether or not human beings are free or determined or whether laws of constancy and causality hold for actual things in nature. The idea that there could be an object “in itself ” is just as emphatically a fiction as the idea of a subject in itself. In contrast, what Kant calls the thing in itself precedes the division into subject and object and is therefore completely unknowable. The only reality we can know is experience itself. One can gather evidence, of course, about the state of nature before the emergence of beings capable of having experiences, but any such investigation has meaning only for the researchers, those interested in looking back on such a past and cashing in on its explanatory power. What we are looking for when examining the fiery birth of the universe cannot be substantially different from what Schelling was looking for in his own investigation of the past. The experience of whatever is present before us always has etched into it a past from which it arose. The past is thus to be found within experience itself. The world we want to understand is always the world that has us in it. “Knowing” that after I die, my atoms will go on existing is just as delusional as knowing that after my body dies, my soul will go on living. The object without a subject is an abstraction from experience in the same way as the subject without an object is an abstraction. Fichte made similar considerations. Where Schelling differs from Fichte is that he does not draw the conclusion that self-conscious experience must therefore be primary and without condition. The unconscious can give birth to consciousness, even if it attains its reality as the uncon-

Translator’s Introduction 15 scious only from the perspective of the consciousness that it occasions. This is the beginning of Schelling’s idea of a past that is eternally past, that is, always already past from the moment that time begins. What lies at the deep bottom of the past is a slumbering consciousness that becomes awakened consciousness only as it approaches the top, the moment of creation. Nature is thus free emergence long before beings arise within it that are capable of experiencing the miracle of free emergence. In this way, living nature is prior to dead nature. It is reason itself that tells us so. The very principle of reason that (much to the satisfaction of the materialist) generates an infinite regress by forcing us to always look for the cause that causes the cause, forces us just as surely (to the equal satisfaction of the idealist) to demand an explanation for the entire series, thus legitimizing the question that Schelling insists upon, the question of the beginning, a question that remains as compelling for an infinite series as it is for a finite one. It is reason that wants to know why, just as it is reason that must accept the impossibility of a final answer. To ask with fierce tenacity “what was the beginning of it all?” is to disclose that, regardless of how reassuringly rational the shell of the world seems to be, its bare existence is irrational. In other words, it is always irrational before it is rational. This is the seed of time. To assert an infinite regress does nothing to restore rationality, for once we announce that there was “no beginning to all the beginnings,” all we have done is to concede that the whole unfolds without a sufficient reason for doing so. Although things can certainly be explained by other things, existence as such remains intrinsically unexplainable. Here one thinks of Kant, who in the Critique of Pure Reason, in the context of a discussion of the cosmological proof of the existence of God, pointed out that any being that could understand itself as the ultimate ground and condition for everything outside itself would still have to wonder about its own existence. To assert that, because God exists eternally, his existence requires no explanation is to throw out the principle of reason rather than to satisfy its demand.30 The point of this reflection is by no means to mock reason, but instead to clarify that reason is the result of a creative response to something that lies deeper, the sheer facticity of existence itself. Reason is not simply always already given, regardless of how much the thoughtless 30. I. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1956), 583.

16 The Ages of the World atheist, the positivistic “true believer” in science, might envision it as being grounded (so much like the God of old) in its own self-evident luminosity. One who believes in the unlimited reach of science will, of course, be as reluctant to concede this as the average religious person will be reluctant to entertain the thought of a perplexed divinity who struggles to come to terms with the riddle of his existence. Belief for both of them is simply the flip side of denial—neither will have much if anything to seek in Schelling. The question, though, is not how true believers might respond to the Weltalter, but how science at its best might respond. And here one thing can be quickly established. If the Weltalter is philosophy’s most tenacious attempt to take on the question of Kant’s baffled creator-god, “whence then am I?,” its approach parallels that of science made aware of the implausibility of “beginning” with a hypothetical construction. One begins not with a construction, but with nature. If God himself has a ground and condition, its name can only be nature, the reality of which long precedes any naming. This does not, however, have to be understood reductively. Nature is not simply another word for the universe. The shallow atheist might assume that the universe is just always there, in much the same way as the traditional theologian once assumed that spirit is just always there. Genuine science, on the other hand, has to ask what it is doing there. It is the question of the origin of the universe that establishes a positive point of connection between science done in this vein and Schelling’s Weltalter. This is doubly the case given that here too, in science itself, the question of origin discloses the irrationality of existence. Nature is at bottom its own inexplicability. The condition for the Big Bang, after all, is twofold: the law of entropy together with the primal singularity that the law declares impossible (Schelling calls these two principles expansion and contraction). The orderly flow of probability is what slowly untangles the absolutely improbable. This can be seen even more clearly if viewed from even further inside, as a quantum physicist might try to do. Here the proximity to Schelling’s Weltalter verges on the uncanny. With the help of mathematics (the a priori knowable that too few of us know and understand), one takes a step back even before the Big Bang that constitutes the beginning of time. Before there was time, there was simply an eternal tangle of possibility simmering somewhere below the threshold of being. Before the world attained a semblance of stability by making its quantum leap into being, before it could ever achieve such a leap, there was, “always already,” a buzzing static that permeated the great void of what was not yet quite real. The eternal past, according

Translator’s Introduction 17 to Schelling, is that which properly speaking never existed until after the universe exploded into being. Only after that first real event does the past exist, but always already as past. There was no time in which the eternal past was once present (WA 74). On his account, the world of presence came both before and after the absence that was the eternal past. Schelling likes to put this theologically: because a father is not a father without a son, the Son can be understood as begetting the Father just as much as the Father begets the Son.31 It is with this daring thought of the beginning of time (the becoming of becoming itself) that Schelling brought to a culmination his long-incubated assault on the Newtonian and Kantian conception of time as a series of now moments strung out on a chain without beginning or end. Whether any of this had a role in the genesis of modern physics is hard to say (just how important was the Oersted-to-Faraday-to-Maxwell connection?), but be that as it may, modern physics has vindicated its legitimacy. If the positivism born out of the Enlightenment understands itself as strict adherence to science, science itself, at least at its deepest level, has long since advanced far beyond where many of its adherents might want to follow. The positivist, after all, seeks a Cartesian kind of certainty, the secularized version of religious faith, whereas modern physics has already completed a leap into uncertainty. There are in fact two basic thoughts of modern physics that show a degree of affinity with the Weltalter. The first was the one from Einstein, who questioned the Newtonian conception of time as something just as fully separated from whatever unfolds within it as the infinite series of natural numbers is separate from the things one might want to count. For Einstein, in contrast, there is one time playing itself out on planet earth and another time playing itself out on any physical body moving with great speed away from the earth. Imagining a rocket ship with a powerful set of headlights makes this fairly easy to picture. Because the speed of light is a constant (i.e., measurably the same whether observed with or against the direction of the earth’s movement through space), light would have to leave the rocket ship at the same speed that the very same light would leave the earth, thus “canceling out” the speed with which the rocket ship itself is moving away. To account for that missing speed, an earth-bound viewer would have to assume that the space around the rocket ship were correspondingly expanded (making for more distance 31. Or, as Schelling writes, “Here the old expression used by alchemists is particularly valid: the Son of the Son is the one that was the Father of the Son.” (WA 59)

18 The Ages of the World to cover) while any clock on board would be ticking away slowly, all of which can be precisely calculated. What makes this one simple example revolutionary in its implications is the fact that the frame of reference can be infinitely varied so that the “size,” stability, and constancy of any segment of space and time becomes infinitely ambiguous.32 Nature as such is in no sense self-identically nature. It attains self-identity only in our understanding of it, which is always subject to change. Schelling’s thought appears to be even more radical: each thing has its own time, but not as a function of the curvature of the space in which it is situated, but instead in terms of its relationship to its own beginning and end. I live one time, the maple tree lives another. But, interestingly, Schelling’s thought does not lead to the hyper-idealism that Einstein’s thought leads to, whereby whatever is measured is made subject to the frame of reference of what does the measuring. For Schelling, times are separated in the same way that lives are separated. This is his idealism. At the same time, however, all of these different times are brought into synch by virtue of their various relationships to the universal organism of nature as a whole, an organism constituted by what Schelling calls the ages of the world. The second basic thought of modern physics is the one associated with the name of Heisenberg, who formulated the famous uncertainty principle. Once again, what is essential seems to be its hyper-idealism: what is measured changes in accord to how it is measured. Nature in itself is in radical flux. This leads to a conception of “randomness” that had already made a significant appearance with Darwin, who traded in the language of determinism for the language of chance. From the Darwinian perspective, but for a random asteroid, dinosaurs rather than humans would be the ones ruling the earth. Life is a series of accidents. One’s very existence depends on a conception by just these parents, in just this instant of time, and with just this degree of penetration. After all, potential siblings always vastly outnumber the one that gets implanted in the womb. The existence of anything seems the result of a preposterous game of chance, multiplied beyond imagining by the fact that it holds for one’s parents, their parents, and so on down the line. Much to the horror of Einstein, who famously responded that “God does not play dice 32. Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function & Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (Chicago: Open Court, 1923), 356–65. For a contemporary discussion of these issues, at times almost uncanny in its proximity to Schelling, see Lee Smolin, Time Reborn (Boston/ NYC: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013).

Translator’s Introduction 19 with the universe,” Heisenberg applied a similar model, one that piles chance upon chance, to every atomic particle and to the universe as a whole. Instead of being bothered by the fiction of a god who gambles, he simply added the further fiction of a good probability theorist who could coach him through his moves. The probability waves of quantum physics are waves that can be calculated, regardless of which side of the quantum leap they stand on. The duty of the scientist is to calculate and to predict, and those are things that quantum mechanics does well enough that the computer of the future will be built on its principles. Once again, what is impressive here is the sovereignty of calculation itself. According to Schelling, in contrast, the future is not so much to be predicted as divined and foretold (WA 3). To launch a rocket to Mars, one must know where Mars will be months in advance—and with the certainty of knowing the solution of a mathematical equation. But as for the natural world as such, while it can be spoken, it cannot be calculated. The universe, on Schelling’s account, is nothing like a vast computer. The contracting and expanding forces that animate it follow the crisscrossing trails of longing and not a series of on-off switches adhering to the commands of a Boolean operator. If modern physics, in opposition to classical physics, does much to vindicate the idea of both an “eternal past” and the irreversibility of time, it is nonetheless still separated from the Weltalter by an abyss as wide as the one that separates nature from history. When the young Schelling proposed to look at nature from the standpoint of practical rather than theoretical reason, what he had in mind was the importance of acknowledging both the full reality of consciousness and its fundamental need for community with others (indeed, for community with nature itself).33 To insist, out of a kind of a priori 33. The shift from theoretical to practical reason entails something far more interesting than a shift from the perspective of Kant’s first critique to the perspective of his second critique, for, as Bruce Matthews has shown in great and wonderful detail, Schelling’s accomplishment was not to play Kant out against Kant, but instead to creatively transform the entire Kantian corpus. What is most interesting in this regard actually takes place within the account of theoretical reason, which undergoes a kind of transformation from the practical point of view. Matthews details this as an inversion of the relationship between analysis and synthesis (one must proceed from the whole rather than from the parts) together with an inversion of the categories of the understanding, with the result that organism rather than mechanism emerges as the proper lens of science. See Bruce Matthews, Schelling’s Organic Form of Philosophy: Life as the Schema of Freedom (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012).

20 The Ages of the World fear of surprise, on the calculability of the real is still to do what Cartesian science has done from its inception: to look at the world from the point of view of a detached subjectivity, that is, from the point of view of solipsistic consciousness. Because only my mind can see my mind, to commit myself to the empirical method of science allows me to know others only through a practical act of generosity: I confer reality on them by observing the similarity of what they do to what I do. Anyone who embraces science as a “worldview” will never have anything more than the Turing test with which to operate. The danger science brings with it is its implicit identification of simulated reality with true reality. If things are consistently to be known only on the basis of mechanical models that mirror them, the virtual can scarcely be distinguished from the real. IV. For these reasons, it is easy enough to agree with Žižek that the proper lens for viewing the Weltalter is not science, but human history—in particular, human history in pursuit of messianic fulfillment. In this regard what is important in Schelling is above all his psychological depth, his clear understanding (and here he anticipates Žižek’s guiding spirit Lacan) that truth is always more what we fear than what we seek. History began not simply with the emergence of high civilization, but with a catastrophic fall,34 albeit a difficult one to decipher, given that unity 34. It was Jürgen Habermas who showed the importance of the Weltalter for an understanding of history in an essay in Theorie und Praxis (not included in the English translation) called “Dialektischer Idealismus im Übergang zum Materialismus—Geschichtsphilosophische Folgerungen aus Schellings Idee einer Contraktion Gottes.” The essay can be found in Theorie und Praxis (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), 172–227. In it, he makes the very important point that some version of the Christian conception of the fall is necessary if history is to be viewed as anything but the eternal recurrence of the same. If Hegel’s thought ultimately moves in a circle, with the end tied back into the beginning, Schelling’s effort is to achieve a conception of history as having both a beginning and an end. The fall, which is always much more than the simple tendency of history to sink back into nature, is thus the precondition of Messianic fulfillment. Habermas’s essay is wide-ranging and utterly seminal, drawing attention to, among other things, the importance of Schelling and of the Weltalter in particular for the emerging tradition of dialectical materialism. In the wake of Habermas, Manfred Frank gave close attention to those arguments of Schelling that served to carry out the transition from Hegel to Marx in Der unendliche Mangel an Sein: Schelling’s Hegelkritik und die Anfänge der Marxschen Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975).

Translator’s Introduction 21 with nature wedded both innocence and savagery. Aboriginal humanity always stands simultaneously above and below us, for evil came into the world as a necessary complement to the very civilization that in its best moments transforms it into beauty and goodness. We carry in ourselves the monstrosity of having defiled primordial innocence. It is a past that festers inside us in the present to the degree that it is not understood. To liberate ourselves from it, we must come to know it, whereby the truly decisive point is that we can know it because in some strange fashion we already know it. “Poured out of the source of all things and the same as it, the human soul has a participatory knowledge (Mitwissenschaft) of creation” (WA 4). Such knowledge is emphatically the knowledge of what must be told as a story—or even as a fable—which is why science in its completed form becomes for Schelling indistinguishable from history (WA 4–5). Cartesian epistemology was, of course, in its own way built around the idea of a participatory knowledge of creation: we understand something to the degree that we can construct a model of it. What Schelling is talking about is of a different order entirely, based as it is on uncovering the source of our own creation out of a region of the self that is more feeling than mind, a region, moreover, that is rooted in a darkness that still awakens our fear. Freud and Lacan are right: we are so terrified of what we “know” that we actively repress it. But once one breaks through this and catches a glimpse of the power of unconscious knowing, one has to concede that madness lies on the side of what we call sanity: the pursuit of Cartesian certainty appears as a sickness, a reflexive withdrawal from the horrific possibility that one’s own subconscious could be the evil demon, making it all in fact no more than a dream. Behind science: the abyss. What constitutes the urgency of the project to understand things rationally is gnostic fear. For Descartes, this was quite literally the fear that the creator might have been an “evil demon.” For modern science, it is the view that the direction of time is decisively defined by entropy. In a world that is constantly falling apart, technological mastery becomes a kind of categorical imperative. In a universe defined by dead matter, reason is the only light we have. A healthier rationalism, one fully confident in the order of nature, would be happy to let the world be. Only a confused and tormented rationality conceives the necessity of building a totally artificial world, quite as if nature itself were the demonic other. Embedded in such a deep contradiction, science cries out for psychoanalysis, something Schelling anticipated both in the way he

22 The Ages of the World understands the past and in his proposal that one make use of an inner dialogue to set oneself free from that past. This is the basic method of the Weltalter: the unconscious must be elevated into conscious knowledge. This is Žižek’s reading of the 1813 draft: we seek to put the past behind ourselves in order to break through to the moment of decision. What he criticizes in Schelling is the way he depicts this breakthrough as if it were the already completed act of a Father God who gave the world its order. If quantum physics lifts the veil that covers the abyss, it just as quickly replaces it by affirming its trust in statistical regularities. In this way, science replicates the work of the lost Father. What Žižek and others would have us realize is that, as historical beings, this is the work that, over and over, we must accomplish for ourselves. The abyss of freedom lies within the human heart. With that insight, we step outside the field that science surveys and seeks to command. The freedom at work in history is not the play of random variation, but the drive of living beings actively seeking to find and live out their destinies. This is where the heart matters more than the mind. This is the case even when the heart’s greatest desire is to escape the terrors of history by submitting to the will of the master. In one regard, Žižek is surely right: what is done in the name of the Father requires scrutiny and open eyes. What makes that difficult to accomplish is the fact that history constantly takes us by surprise, breaking forth with the unpredictability of the thief in the night. Fear is what makes us look to science in the same way we once looked to God. The goal, to use the familiar phrase from Hegel, is to put an end to history. There are those who, after the fall of the Soviet Union, assumed that capitalism, in conjunction with science and technology, was the proper name for an end that would be completed through the process of globalization. Once capitalism had no force lurking outside of it, the vagaries of history would become a thing of the past. This, of course, is a fantasy, undone by the very contradictions of capitalism itself. What it fails to see above all else is that capitalism, far from being the highest accomplishment of civilization, is nothing other than the return of the repressed, the proof of the power of a past that refuses to be past. To get this more clearly into view, we can look at three rather obvious explanations for why history is inherently incalculable. First, there is honest debate about where we should be headed in the first

Translator’s Introduction 23 place. The demise of the Soviet Union is not really the demise of the communist ideal. After all, it is still legitimate to ask whether property is theft, for why assume that it has been allotted us in just proportion to our luck, power, and intelligence? Why assume, for that matter, that justice is truly what we seek? Given that our own position in the world is woven into the history of plundered wealth and actual murder, justice is something a thoughtful person would do well to fear, just as we all fear death. The goal of history appears ominous, even in the guise of the kingdom of God, which must be ushered in by apocalypse. Even if consensus could be reached about what is best for humanity, a second difficulty emerges that is just as intractable: who among us is truly prepared to make humanity’s goal our own? The will is intrinsically torn. What Schelling discerns at the deepest level of reality is evident everywhere in the realm of the everyday. It is the same person who thinks one thing while in church on Sunday and quite another thing while sounding off at the country club; the same person who delivers a warning about the looming catastrophe of climate change and then climbs into an SUV to head for the airport. The demand of morality can be earnestly felt, even as we choose the path of self-interest. But the rift goes even deeper than that. There are times when people prefer, out of simple spite, not their own good over the common good, but instead what is no good at all. Dostoevsky painted the portrait of one such man in his Notes from the Underground. What shatters the possibility of a felicity calculus is what is more primary than desire. Freud called it the death drive, the lure of the abyss. If a man can set fire to his own house out of spite, if even a child can consider suicide simply for the pleasure of “showing them,” if masses of humanity can throw themselves into the arms of a demagogue, then the secret power of history has been revealed: human beings are free to take very great risks indeed, for on some very deep level we all seek death. As Schelling puts it, the will that wills nothing precedes the will that wills something. The desire for the lost nirvana of pre-birth bliss, while universally human, is rooted more deeply, defining the life of nature just as decisively as the will to survive. As a result, the normal felicity calculus holds only for those who live life superficially, holding neither for those sublime souls who lose themselves in contemplation nor for those lonely and alienated figures who inhabit Dostoevsky’s novels. Always worse than the demonic evil that defines for us the “enemy” is the everyday evil that we experience as innocently as we experi-

24 The Ages of the World ence boredom. For what apart from boredom could explain why entire nations march off to war for no better reason than to satisfy the greed or wounded pride of a demented leader? If the end of history is understood as the attainment of utopia, it must always contend with another end that takes the form of universal destruction. This is why history so often intervenes with violence, why nuclear bombs are stockpiled far past the point where to destroy the enemy becomes identical with self-destruction. The very nation that has declared itself holy and just ends up pursuing the project of self-defense with the same infernal logic that motivates the suicide bomber: I so want to see you die that I will happily destroy myself to make it happen. The insanity of hypermilitarization is the flip side of the placid normalcy of the suburbs. Even Hegel, the alleged optimist, conceded that history is a slaughter bench. If he embraced the idea of progress, he did so because he recognized negation as the most energetic mover of concepts. As he learned from Hobbes, there is a dialectic that weds war and peace. The state was built on the memory of the savage war of all against all, and it stays in place for the protection it affords against the threat of its recurrence. There is an underlying logic to all of this. But more impressive than that logic is the strength of the passions that bring it all into play. Once fear and hatred are unleashed, even the strongest state can dissolve back into anarchy. By offering a dialectic of the passions (and on a still-deeper level a dialectic of blind material forces) as an alternative to Hegel’s dialectic of the concept, Schelling’s Weltalter, had he completed it, could have served as an alternative to the prevailing understanding of history as inevitable progress. It is doubtful, however, that it would have done anything either to moderate the quest for utopia that arises from the secularization of Christianity or to moderate the destructive consequences of this quest. History is intrinsically and necessarily as regressive as it is progressive, in very large part because human beings, masters of denial, are reluctant to admit just that. We either stave off apocalypse with the help of good engineering or cheer on its arrival in the confidence that we are the ones who will be raptured off to heaven. The importance of the Weltalter for an understanding of history is not the place it might be assigned in the battle of big ideas. It is not, for this reason, a matter of Schelling versus Hegel. History is more than an intellectual battlefield. Indeed, it is more even than a battlefield of the passions. Sloth is a sin more deadly than either greed or wrath. As a result, ideological fervor is perhaps less a problem than it seems. More

Translator’s Introduction 25 disturbing than the battle of beliefs is the passivity with which people latch on to them. Who, after all, takes his or her belief seriously enough to question it and find out whether it is right? The real enemy is stupidity, particularly the stupidity that is compatible even with the steady, hard work required by any of the established intellectual disciplines.35 If science at its core gains energy and focus when it confronts the irrationality of existence, science at its periphery is happy to substitute mere curiosity for wonder, working within the parameters of an established discipline without summoning the energy (or courage) to ever throw it into question. The world, one assumes, is just there. In this regard, working intellectuals are sometimes hard to distinguish from any other child of privilege, those whom Nietzsche described as the “last men,” those who “blink” whenever a conversation begins to get deep, taking solace in the fact that happiness has been invented by someone or another and is currently on sale by Amazon. From this perspective, suffering is always only an obscenity. For Schelling as for Nietzsche, it is the gateway to everything higher. Indeed, it is the gateway to creation as such: Pain is something necessary and universal, the unavoidable point within the passage to freedom. We will not shy away from portraying even the primal living being, insofar as it too arises developmentally, in a condition of suffering. Suffering is universally the path to glory, not only with regard to human beings but also with regard to the creator. He leads his creature through no other path than the one he himself also had to traverse. (WA 40) For the last men, in contrast, the very fact that suffering can awaken serious reflection by inducing one to question existence itself would have to be viewed as evidence for why suffering must be eliminated. “Serious reflection” is for those who forgo their antidepressants, just as “the unexamined life is not worth living” is a slogan for masochists. The last men believe this at such a basic level that they end up shrugging their shoulders when faced with the history of violence that is incubated in the refusal to think. 35. Jason Wirth, the translator of the 1815 draft of The Ages of the World, devoted an entire chapter to an illuminating discussion of this kind of stupidity in Schelling’s Practice of the Wild (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015).

26 The Ages of the World The Weltalter can provide a counternarrative to the dull stupidity that longs for nothing more than the conquest of suffering and the steady extension of what makes us comfortable. What it reveals in the context of the particular moment of history we occupy is the necessity of tearing open the general consensus that the solution to the riddle of existence is as simple as the universalization of the suburban way of life. Given that the earth audibly groans under the ravages of even as much suburbia as already exists, it can only be a good thing if humanity seems suddenly confused about where it should be headed. Such confusion is a gift, but it will be hard to sustain. Even the grotesque warfare of the twentieth century did little to shake the general belief in progress. This is nowhere more evident than in the contemporary university, where the guiding assumption is that knowledge, even in the complete absence of wisdom, is always for the good of humanity. Few remember the anguish Einstein underwent when E = mc2 achieved its practical application. Nearly everyone remains committed to the project of developing new technologies to extend the range and scope of power. Few imagine thereby what might have come of Hitler’s surge to power if his propaganda machine had had behind it, instead of just newspaper and radio, the full range of modern media—or the form his eventual suicide might have taken if his bunker had been equipped with a nuclear button or stocks of flu viruses reengineered to be as contagious and lethal as possible. With the decline of the humanities has come a general languishing of the dialectical imagination, making Hegel as inaccessible as Schelling. In such an atmosphere, issues that belong together are dealt with in isolation. One researcher works hard to pursue the dream of an ever-expanding economy, while another outlines the need for an everdiminishing carbon footprint. Technological innovations are discussed with a one-sided appeal to all of the problems they could solve, while dismissing any “Luddite” talk about the evils they could facilitate. When evils nonetheless surface for everyone to see (for instance, when computer hackers throw an election), they are bemoaned as unforeseeable, accomplishing nothing to curb enthusiasm about the potential of new innovations to come. Professors eagerly pursue the latest classroom technology, quite as if the university has a duty to sell products for Apple and Microsoft. The maxim “knowledge is power” is highlighted while the older maxim “power corrupts” is forgotten. Universities have become

Translator’s Introduction 27 places of research rather than reflection. In all of this, such dull stupidity reigns that one yearns, not so much for crisis, as for the recognition that crisis is already upon us. With regard to the university in particular, it is worth asking why positivists, despite a strong verbal commitment to truth and the power of reason, have been so willing to dispense with reflection. In this, we can follow Žižek: it is capitalism that joins science to history. The modern corporate university, regardless of its ideological self-justification, was not set in place by the thoughtful pursuit of a rational utopia. As the modern corporate university, it serves the needs of a growing and ever-changing economy. Its primary interests and concerns are tethered to the quest for power and money, so much so that even the vision of utopia is easy to dismiss as just another marketing strategy. Greed is a more potent force than the desire for the good of humanity. The dark cravings that were represented by Cronus and his Titans were subdued by the angels of civilization. They were subdued, but not abolished. The secret of capitalism was to solve the problem of production by setting free what civilizations throughout the world had always endeavored to restrain. Prometheus unchained flexes his muscles with the full energy of liberated desire. Nowhere can one more clearly see the regressive moment at the very heart of what we persist in calling progress. The cyclical booms and busts of a capitalist economy reflect the cyclical movement of a nature still blind, not yet awakened into a spirit capable of learning from its mistakes. The virtue of the capitalist who invests more than he spends depends on the vice of the hedonist who consumes not only more than he needs, but, seduced by the power of modern marketing, more even than he wants. The systematic manufacturing of desire nullifies the pious prayer, “lead me not into temptation.” If Adam Smith assumed that the excesses of capitalism would be held in check by the natural compassion the banker must feel when he sees a beggar, the logic of capitalism, whereby money accrues to money, leads to the construction of a new world where the paths of the banker and the beggar never cross. Central to capitalism is not its utopian appeal, but its determination to turn everything into money, while letting the future go to hell. In its triumphant return to the world of dog-eat-dog, reason gives way to cynicism. Where laws are made in the interest of money, there comes a point where laws can simply be ignored. Theft for the little man deserves punishment; theft for the hoarders of capital

28 The Ages of the World wins them praise and money. Callicles has won out over Socrates; the language of the country club has contaminated even the language of churches and universities—and does so on the basis of its “refreshing” honesty and authenticity, its disentanglement from the “infantile” longing for justice and morality. On the other hand: why not honesty? It is clear to anyone that the utopia of globalized science and technology is no more assured than the nuclear destruction of humanity. The pretense that it is where we are and should be headed is just that, a pretense. The utopian visions that win out are the ones that promise to make money for someone. Capitalism, by transforming the university into a corporate enterprise, has tied science to the more unseemly engines of history. Under the reign of capitalism, the planet of the apes is as plausible a future for the world as the unveiling of the great supercomputer-god. Indeed, given the human propensity for violence, and the fact that computers are as prone to misuse as any other machine, it is probably a good deal more plausible. No real scientist would deny that, regardless of how intently the frightened adherents to the cult of science hold onto their faith. There are capitalists, to be sure, who care deeply about the future of humanity. But none of them do so as effective (and successful) representatives of capitalism. If the future can be exchanged for money, it will in fact be exchanged for money. If the transaction can be made with the earth, and that transaction has long since been made, it can be made with anything, even to the point of sucking the air out of the lungs of one’s own grandchildren. All it takes is the inability to recognize that anything is real beyond the self. It is an inability rooted in the lack of imagination. Until one actually lays eyes on one’s grandchild, she does not exist. And once she does exist, she too often is understood as simply a part of one’s own private empire. The theoretical solipsism at the heart of science is dwarfed by the practical solipsism at the heart of capitalism, whereby the atmosphere of constant betrayal it engenders is simply to be endured as the cost of doing business. The truly great accomplishment of Schelling’s Ages of the World, particularly in the 1811 version, is the depth of its challenge to either kind of solipsism. In a handwritten addition to the 1811 Ages, Schelling spoke to both of these dangers, while revealing his command of the language of prophecy.

Translator’s Introduction 29 Unlike what most people believe, the ordered condition of the world is not to be found secure in the understanding. True, it is secure enough as long as eternal love has not died and remains the ruling force, but it is not at all as secure as it presumably would be if it were held together by blind necessity, or as so many believe, by the eternal laws of nature. For the old state of affairs still always prevails in the ground; it is not held back by iron bonds of necessity but is restrained instead by what is most gentle, what is mild and good, lest it once again break forth. When lightning flashes, and storm and torrential rain threaten to throw heaven and earth into confusion, unleashing the elements to clamor and rage, or when the solid ground of the earth tremors and quakes; or, most horrifically, when terrible wrath is ignited in human communities, destroying trust and friendship; when atrocities and abominations break forth, and all ties dissolve; in such times as these a person will feel just how much the old condition is still alive. When this happens everything becomes uncanny, just as in the most horrific witching hour. Human beings are so situated that they have to keep alive the power of love, lest in madness they tear one another to pieces, like the cannibalistic monsters that occupy the cold ocean deep. It is for this reason that true criminals awaken not only the outrage of other men but are disowned by the whole of nature, until they come to regard themselves as monsters expelled from the world, persecuted everywhere and always made to flee. Woe to those who call forth the old chaos, seeking to break the covenant, through which alone humanity is able to cope. Oh, past, thou yawning abyss of thought! (WA 217–18) In the face of this prophetic flood of words, the scientist can only shudder at the thought that love, not the laws of nature, is what orders the world and keeps the peace. Against the a priori assurance that the laws of nature must correspond to the categories of the understanding, Schelling calls attention to the irrationality at the bottom of nature, simply by reminding us of the potential for catastrophe that nature bears within itself. If the face of the world is subdued, why is it not always subdued? If the world is held together by reason, why the violent

30 The Ages of the World ruptures and the deep and catastrophic reversals that characterize the history of nature?36 And when Schelling turns his attention from nature to the human community, and again suggests the necessity of love, the capitalist can only smirk, knowing of no love that goes beyond the self and whatever the self seeks to possess. Schelling’s Weltalter is the chronicle of love’s entanglement with particularity (its intimate alliance with hate) and the always-looming possibility of its ecstatic completion in what he calls the birth of God. The theoretical solipsism that results from science’s desire to know everything is, as Kant and Fichte showed, at least compatible with a strong practical and moral commitment to the future of humanity. If one cannot know the reality of another person, one can at least postulate it. In contrast, the practical solipsism of the capitalist, the desire not simply to know but to possess everything, has no counterpoise and cares not a fig for the future. Its view is that of the cynic: history is a sordid affair, but at least one can make a killing from it. To end here, where history has brought us, is to end uncomfortably close to despair. V. Read through the lens of science, the Ages of the World discloses itself as a profound work that has every right to be taken seriously, anticipating science on a number of important issues, while at the same time offering a compelling challenge to its implicit theology, a theology succinctly captured by Leibniz with the phrase: Cum Deus calculat . . . fit mundus. 37 Read through the lens of history, what Schelling offers is a necessary reminder that progress always comes at a cost. What might be 36. Iain Hamilton Grant draws from both Schelling and Deleuze to speak in this regard of a “transcendental volcanism” that underlies the phenomenal (and hence law-abiding) order that science generally investigates. If science investigates the order where everything has a secure ground, it presupposes a deeper order where nature intermittently ungrounds what it has brought forth to make way for new manifestations. To follow Grant is to understand geology as the truly foundational science in the very concrete sense that it unites nature and history. See Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature After Schelling (New York: Continuum, 2006), 199–206. 37. A marginal addition to Leibniz, Dialogus (1677).

Translator’s Introduction 31 judged progress from the point of view of the creature comforts enjoyed by a few generations will appear as horrific catastrophe from a broader perspective. A true believer in the cult of science and technology might assume that problems such as climate change and depleted topsoil can be “fixed” in time to save the future of humanity. They would be hard put, however, to find a fix for the countless species that have already been driven to extinction. In opposition to Kant and Fichte, who respond to the problem of practical solipsism by appealing to the idea of a moral community of equally rational beings, Schelling notes that that too is but a variation of solipsistic thinking. We do not yet acknowledge the reality of the other when we focus solely on our shared rationality, a rationality from which all “otherness” is abolished. An ethics that is not grounded in the heart is not a true ethics, which is why Schelling in his youth stressed that it has to be rooted in physics, albeit a transformed physics that comprehends nature as that which gives birth to life. What distinguishes Schelling’s position in the Weltalter from the pantheistic exuberance of his earlier philosophy is that he now understands that the underlying real that is the ground of nature is precisely what gave rise to the solipsistic impulse in the first place: yes, Cronus is a god who devours his own children, but out of fear rather than simple malice. The warfare of all against all does in fact define something monstrous that lies at the bottom of nature. Indeed, there are those who, understanding themselves as realists, call for its return (a gun in every hand) in the name of safety. Although in its innocence a child knows the reality of everything it sees around it, reflective humanity is caught in a web of appearances that makes anything with a life of its own seem unsettling. To celebrate the beauty of nature without acknowledging the horrific way it lives by devouring its own flesh is more flight and denial rather than genuine love for the wild. This defines Schelling’s engagement with the past as such. One releases oneself from it only by recognizing how engulfed one is in it. “How few people know anything of a real past!” he writes. “Without a vital present, born by a real division (Scheidung) from the past, no such thing exists. The person who is not capable of confronting the past has no past. Or, better put, never emerges from it, but lives steadily inside it” (WA 11). To be entangled in the past is to live where God has not yet been born, where the world (as anything enduring and real) has not yet been created. Christianity, with its sublime doctrine of the forgiveness of sins, may have stepped on rare occasion out of the past into the

32 The Ages of the World present, but by losing itself again in what Nietzsche called ressentiment it slips back into it, over and over. There are those who cite another’s apparent “failure to forgive” as justification for inflicting the morbid kinds of punishment that have come to define religious zeal. There is much in what we call the past that defines for us a remote and seemingly unattainable future: Socrates and Christ would be two such examples. What distinguishes the 1811 version of the Ages of the World is the degree to which the story of the past is told in conjunction with the story of its overcoming. This explains the juxtaposition of the two main parts of the work. Part One is devoted to emergent nature and features the “Mother of all things,” undergoing the fierce contractions that enable her to give birth to primordial nature. Part Two is devoted to the “Genealogy of Time,” which lays out the whole of time, past, present, and future, as the Trinitarian movement from Father to Son to Spirit. Commentators as varied as Hogrebe, Žižek, and Krell regard this as evidence that Schelling lacked the strength and courage required to accept the death of God (as if a god could die who has yet to be born!).38 What they fail thereby to notice is just how revolutionary Schelling’s proposal to identify God with time really is—and how far it departs from the most basic tendency of orthodox Christianity, which identifies God with eternity and transforms Jesus Christ into a perfect being disguised as a man. The appeal to eternal perfection is meant to affirm the unquestionable authority of the Church—and of whatever political arrangement it happens to sanction. Schelling’s goal, in contrast, is to turn orthodoxy inside-out, disclosing a Christianity that is ecumenical rather than sectarian, and that, above all, is future, not past. This is a task he takes on with courage and great energy. He was motivated in part by the realization of how much his earlier philosophy had fallen short of the project he had conceived with Hölderlin and Hegel of transforming religion in such a way that it could move the masses.39 The pantheism he shared with Goethe and the Romantics could move only those with a refined aesthetic sensibility and a willingness to abandon the religion of the entire European continent. Its Spinozian premises, moreover, locked it into a conception of time 38. Wolfram Hogrebe suggests that Schelling’s introduces his theological speculations in order to endure the horror of knowing the sheer emptiness of being as such (Prädikation und Genesis, 126). David Krell, on the other hand, takes issue more specifically with Schelling’s use of Christian theological language. 39. The Oldest System Programme of German Idealism.

Translator’s Introduction 33 that, precisely because it is stretched out over infinity, has none of the sharp edge of finitude that is required for revolutionary change. Birth and death are the truly transformative principles. Challenging Christians to actually be Christian was the best way for a European of Schelling’s era to have a chance at effecting real change. The same thing holds today for all of the world’s religions. Even secular humanists have to be compelled to renew their humanism in the face of the solipsistic nihilism that a poorly conceived atheism tends to breed. Krell faults Schelling in particular for adding Part Two to the 1811 version of the Weltalter, as if he thereby turned his back on hard-won pagan wisdom, in order to “take solace” in “the jealous solar father and his loving mirror-image son.”40 In the same way, Žižek assumes that Schelling misused the “indivisible remainder,” his own best discovery, as the ground for separating God from his creatures, thus yielding a theism that is both more orthodox and more suspect than Schelling’s initial pantheism. What he ignores is that Schelling’s is not theism, if that is to imply a god somehow standing above and outside of the world. Instead, Schelling’s god is just as hip-deep in the incomprehensible ground as the rest of us are. His theism is deeply grounded in the pantheism of the “elemental,” the surging flow of matter thirsting for spirit. And on the other hand, it is clearly a mistake to assume that pantheism is really good honest atheism, of the sort that leads Žižek to applaud Hegel’s pantheism of the spirit.41 Genuine atheists know only the dead and mechanical. Pantheists, in contrast, find pulsing life in everything, even at the most elemental level, for instance where gaseous clouds of hydrogen and oxygen exploit their mutual valence to join and form water. If pantheists go on to take note (as Hölderlin did) of the absent god, they do so with sorrow and lament, convinced that nature will once again disclose the secret she carries in her heart. What could be more different than the modern fantasy of a strong and courageous atheism that is content to withstand the value-free perspective of objective science, a perspective that already as a matter of simple methodology reduces minds to bodies and bodies to mechanisms of one sort or another? Wolfram Hogrebe is caught in the same divide. An enthusiastic and occasionally intoxicated disciple of Nietzsche, he nonetheless found 40. Krell, The Tragic Absolute, 122. 41. Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), 98.

34 The Ages of the World it necessary to transcribe the Weltalter into the language of analytic philosophy before proceeding to reveal its depths, even to the point of uncovering its solicitation to madness. On the one hand, this might simply be good strategy, a bold salvo fired at an encampment so fully self-satisfied and self-enclosed that it recognizes only two languages in the world: English and symbolic logic. On the other hand, one wonders if, by loosely allying himself with a tradition so positivistic that it excludes any possibility of God-talk, his real intention is to show that, unlike Schelling, he himself is able to withstand the discovery of madness at the bottom of reason—and can do so without succumbing to the temptation to flee to God for support.42 If his point is to suggest something like “we latecomers have the courage to bear what drove even our most courageous progenitors to take up religion,” then it is patronizing in the same way that progressive ideology is always patronizing in its dismissal of the past. Here it would be wise to take to heart what Schelling has disclosed about the nature of time: the tug of war between past and future constitutes the present in such a way that a text from the past can be laden with far more futurity than anything we are capable of today. In making this statement, I do not want to deny the tremendous progress that has been made in a specific field such as logic. Both Hogrebe and his younger colleague Markus Gabriel43 have accomplished a formidable task in showing how much reason and science can come to the defense of a metaphysical realism such as we find in Schelling, whereby reason is not so much constitutive of reality as it is constituted by reality, adept at sorting it out and making sense of it, without ever pretending to have generated it in the first place. In all of the gradations of their analyses, they have indeed left Schelling far behind. But in doing so, they tend to forget that they themselves are working out of the same intuition that underlies Schelling’s understanding of the relationship between Father and Son. The theological language is legitimate not to the degree that it is grounded in a scholastic metaphysics but to the degree that it has its own independent life quite apart from any such metaphysics. It has to be comprehended, in other words, as the language of the heart and not as the language of the head. By saying this, I run the danger, of course, of simply corroborating the initial thesis that Schelling, out of weakness, has succumbed 42. Hogrebe, Prädikation und Genesis, 11 and 126, 43. Markus Gabriel, Transcendental Ontology: Essays in German Idealism (London: Bloomsbury, 2011).

Translator’s Introduction 35 to a religious point of view. But here one should note how easily the contemporary point of view can be flipped. Rather than being impressed with the great courage that Žižek, Krell, and Hogrebe, or any more conventional contemporary atheist, shows in the face of mortality, I might find myself turning suspicious, sensing in them a fearful response when they find Schelling talking sensibly about what came before this world (an unknowable somehow known) and what will come after (an unknowable somehow anticipated). After all, what is anxiety-inducing about mortality if, instead of being framed in a question, it is simply framed by nothing whatsoever? As Socrates rightfully suggested in Plato’s Phaedo (107, c–d), far from being a horror that requires courage to face, what follows from the assurance that everything just disappears at death is simply the cheerful assurance of the hedonist: “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you shall die.” From the standpoint of pure reason, one will wonder why the dogmatic certitude that this bit of life is the whole story is preferable to the dogmatic certitude that it is a test with eternal consequences. Kant’s antinomies show clearly enough that both are equally plausible. This means of course that both are equally questionable. Dispensing with the possibility of eternal hell is hardly a sign of great courage. Indeed, this is why Nietzsche, after exploding the myth of the “afterlife,” had to reinvent the idea of hell in the form of the eternal recurrence of the same. Like Schelling, he knew that the only possibility for personal transformation is given when easy assurances are set aside and the outermost possibilities of reason are boldly and honestly confronted. To dispense with the possibility of hell is neither courageous nor wise. It is not courageous because it gets us too easily off the hook. It is not wise because the very measure of all that is good and beautiful is the horror they either elude or transmogrify. When reason sets out to eliminate the outermost possibilities it only succeeds in creating the alternative hell of what is stultifying and boring. Those who find life too much to bear can hardly be the ones who first conceived the idea of living it out forever. Death will be seen alternatively as a curse or a blessing, regardless of whether one conceives it from a religious or a secular standpoint. There is in any event nothing “Nietzschean” about turning one’s back on eternity. The horror of Nietzsche’s “over and over” is simply the distillation of the horror of “forever and ever.” Although it is true that Nietzsche cursed Christianity, he did so as the son of a theologian, as someone fully aware of what is stated in Matthew 5: 43–45: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’

36 The Ages of the World But I tell you, love your enemies and bless those who curse you, that you may be sons of your father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on both evil and good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” Nietzsche’s curse, in other words, can be read as a challenge to Christians to be Christian, which is precisely to “bless those who curse you.” In this case, of course, it would require one to confer a blessing on Nietzsche for taking the extreme measure of declaring himself the Anti-Christ. Any true Christian (if such a thing were possible) would have to concede that precisely the Anti-Christ of a Nietzsche might merit a blessing. After all, what he demands is what Christ once demanded: “overcome the spirit of ressentiment, for only so can one live in accord to an inscrutable father who causes his sun to rise on both evil and good.” To be a son of the father is the furthest thing in the world from what Krell dismissed as the Christology of “the jealous solar father and his loving mirror-image son.” If the son was the mirror image, then the father too was the crucified one. And if the solar father was a jealous solipsist, who demanded slavish praise from everyone, then the son was not his “mirror image,” but the one who rebuked him and taught him to transcend his jealousy by learning the difficult art of true love. Or, as Schelling makes clear, the son is the one who elevated the father to divinity, showing the father the senselessness of living (to borrow language from Žižek) “like a trapped animal who desperately tries to disengage itself from a snare.” This is the “psychotic,” mad God who is “absolutely alone,” since he “tolerates nothing outside of himself.”44 The father can only learn from a son who, instead of fighting his tormenters, acquiesces to the point of crucifixion. Nor should one forget that the son was generated out of the father, a higher personality out of the lower, in much the same way that Nietzsche suggested that the Übermensch can arise only through an act of self-overcoming. Nietzsche seems to suggest, of course, that Christians must lay aside their willingness to suffer for the sake of embracing power, as if indeed evil can only be combated by evil. But what he really was after was the formation of a Christian perfect enough to dispense entirely with the name of “Christian,” in order, like Christ, to find his power in his 44. Slavoj Žižek/F. W. J. Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World, 17. Žižek overlooks Nietzsche’s core insight: the redemptive possibility given in the psychotic fracture of such a self, an insight that Teresa Fenichel brings to life in Schelling, Freud, and the Philosophical Foundations of Psychoanalysis (Oxford/NYC: Routledge, 2018).

Translator’s Introduction 37 capacity to endure suffering, much like Nietzsche himself, who signed off on life under the epithet of “the Crucified One.”45 At this point, we need to renew the question I posed earlier: Is the idea of meeting evil with the “power of love” and with everything that is “mild and good” a regression into infantile fantasy? Or is it the hardest thing of all, acquiescence to crucifixion? Accepting the pain of finitude is neither necessary nor advisable, except, however, when we are faced with radical evil, particularly after it has been joined together with demonic power. In that instance is not the only possible rebuke to evil the refusal to extend its life by reproducing it in the demand for revenge? The tight economy of evil, its capacity to reproduce itself in the spirit of righteous indignation, can, in this instance, only be broken by the power of love. And what is love, if not the affirmation of what is?—and this, not under the condition of its “goodness,” but in the recognition of its freedom, in the recognition, that is, of its capacity to be either good or evil? Creation, as already noted, is ecstatic release and not an exercise in manufacturing utopia. It is, as Schelling put it in his 1809 essay on human freedom, “letting the ground operate,”46 which is always also, letting evil be a possibility. If God refused to create out of fear of suffering, then God would not be God, but in fact the spirit of evil, the will to destroy everything that is. Being always comes at a cost. God is not the animal that draws the snare tighter and tighter, for such an animal is the crazed antithesis of God or, as Schelling is bold enough to recognize, only the possibility of God. For we are not saying that God could not have come on the scene as an animal, but only that the animal has not become God until, for the sake of freedom and all that is good, it sits back and gnaws off his own leg. That such a possibility did not occur to Žižek shows, I think, his limitation. For, bound to the political, he is only able to envision the moment of decision as an act of appropriating power. On the other hand, I do believe that he understood where Schelling was headed in the 1813 rewriting of the Ages. For the paradoxes here are in fact almost too much to bear. Goodness is the refusal to fight evil. Evil is the insistence on 45. In this regard, it would be helpful if one were to remember that the Genealogy of Morals was meant to be read in its entirety, its hermeneutical goal being the reappropriation of “ascetic ideals,” the subject of its third and final (and largely unread) essay. 46. “Wirkenlassen des Grundes” SW 1/7, 375. Priscilla Hayden-Roy translates: “This allowing of the ground’s action . . .” in Philosophy of German Idealism, 251.

38 The Ages of the World fighting evil, always in the name of the good—even if the good is only one’s own, and even if it consists of nothing more than spitefulness. God creates the world by letting evil be. His demonic counterpart, on the other hand, would destroy the world out of simple compassion, aware that it is riddled with evil. The same person who is God was once the person who is now his demonic counterpart. Before sending a rainbow in recognition that the world is beautiful enough to affirm, God (not-yet God) first sent a flood in a fit of anger, determined to obliterate a world where brothers rape their sisters and murder their brothers. Schelling’s intuition is incommensurate with orthodox conceptions of divine perfection, but it is unparalleled in its capacity to get close to the God of scripture. This is the God who, in his wisdom, so loves reality that he affirms it together with its darkest conditions. Such perfection bound to imperfection far surpasses the God whose heart is so tender as to prefer, for the sake of everything and everyone that suffers, calm retreat into nirvana. Even so, he is not the one instead of the other. He is both, each in its proper time and in its proper sequence. For time is the resolution of all paradox. And the reluctance to keep up with time is the source of the temptation to cling to one side rather than the other, itself not entirely a bad thing, for gravity adds density to the world. VI. In the same way as the past contaminates and weighs down the present (as that from which the present must always disentangle itself), the future has the capacity to ease and lighten its load, but only when viewed in the purity of a hope beyond hope. That which can never be engineered (e.g., saving the earth) must always come in the form of a gift. The challenge for humanity is not to save the earth, but to live in such a way that they still have a place on it when the earth saves itself. Viewed this way, the future both does and does not operate as a telos. This is not to suggest that, as the ideal of the consummate community of love, it does not provide us with concrete goals: there is much work to be done in the world. But as the eschaton shrouded within the mystery of death, it is never ours to command. It is in precisely this way that the religious perspective goes beyond the political. Politics is fundamentally (though not solely) about power, and to the extent this is true it is always an invitation to the tyrant or, in our terms, the practical solipsist.

Translator’s Introduction 39 Religion as such (something different than institutionalized religion) demands trust in the reality and goodness of a spirit that is both more than human and for the first time truly human. Despite the fact that it clearly has nothing to do with the picture of a bigger-than-the-universe person embracing and holding up the world, I see no reason not to call it divine. As Schelling writes, “everything that is divine is also human, just as everything truly human is divine” (WA 249). To the degree that the future becomes wedded to the present as a project to be achieved, it is the source of anxiety and dissension. To the degree that it is respected as future, as the always-open invitation to let spin the wheels of the imagination, it is the source of hope and consolation. Most important for Schelling, it can have a civilizing effect on what for the most part is a fearful and highly competitive animal. The past and future constitute the present but do so fully only by being held apart from it. Time has an ecstatic structure. Its very meaning is release. Only by realizing that the crack time carries within it is as deep as death can one experience each moment as the miracle of resurrection. Schelling composed his first draft of the Weltalter while still in mourning for Caroline, who had died two years previously. In mourning Caroline, he also mourned her daughter Auguste Böhmer, to whom he had been briefly betrothed before she died in 1800 (leaving Schelling free to marry her mother). Throughout the year 1811, Schelling corresponded with the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen about the completion of Caroline’s unfinished task: a grave monument for Auguste Böhmer. In the course of the correspondence, the work effectively became a monument for both mother and daughter. Prominently displayed in the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen, it consists of three great marble reliefs. Framed by images of Nemesis and the Angel of Death, the central relief depicts Auguste nursing her mother Caroline. A snake wrapped around her leg symbolizes that her mother’s illness has now bitten into her: the daughter dies to make the mother well. The image thus evokes the self-sacrificing dimension of love that lifts it so far above desire. But, as Schelling’s correspondence (also in 1811) with Pauline Gotter makes clear, what ended in death did not just end in death, for Pauline, bound in friendship to both Auguste and Caroline, was in effect their gift to Schelling from beyond the grave. It is a beyond that neither science nor history can touch. True, there is no heaven outside of the heart. But the heart reaches far, both into the deepest past and the most remote future. During the

40 The Ages of the World time that Schelling devoted the full power of his philosophical genius to the project of opening the deep past before all birth and world, his heart was ecstatically lifted into the spirit world on the other side of death, made real not by a fantasy of immortality, but by the strength of love itself. In his youth, Schelling understood all of this in terms of the eternal life of nature, in the same way that Hölderlin did when, in Hyperion, he depicted the beloved Diotima, already dead and buried, as revealing herself in the beauty of the sky. It is a vision of resurrected life that Schelling holds onto. But in the anguish of his loss, he now deepens it into a relationship with the beyond. Time is no longer construed as an infinite series of moments that always fall short of attaining the infinity they seek. For with the deep cut that tears time and eternity asunder, both beginning and end are constituted as real, the pain of scission giving way to the tranquility of death. It is a tranquility that is more than mere cessation. As Wordsworth put it, “with an eye made quiet . . . we see into the life of things.”47 That this life is imagination is no deficit. Creation makes for a world that is more real, not less. We are fast approaching the time to stop in our tracks. Recentered in the lucid purity (Lauterkeit) of eternity, even our ever-dulling world can be imaginatively recreated. The Ages of the World testifies to both the pain of a broken heart and the bliss of the harmony that underlies it. The heart torn open reveals not only the eternal recurrence of its systole and diastole but its capacity for transfiguration, given in its heart of hearts: “what is supreme within a human being is what, in God and in all things, is the innermost heart of reality. It is eternity, properly speaking. Look at a child, the way it rests in itself without distinction, and you will perceive a picture of purest divinity” (WA 228). Auguste Böhmer died while still enough of a child that Schelling’s mourning for her can be joined to the image of divine innocence. What we all hope for is what the present world makes impossible: that a little child will one day lead a procession of wolf and lamb, leopard and kid, lion and calf.48 The Weltalter is the story of two children. The first grows into a monster after being stripped of innocence by the discovery of death and pain. He is all-devouring Cronus. But even he is offered the possibility of redemption with the birth of every new 47. Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” 48–49. 48. Isaiah 11:6.

Translator’s Introduction 41 child of innocence.49 The second child is the one who, by successfully melting his heart, enables Cronus to become the Father. This is, of course, the story of each of us,50 depicted in its most basic moments: the alternation between the bliss of nirvana and the eruption out of it of competing desires (to be or not to be), the birth of every manner of pleasure and pain, and with that birth, the emergence of the various conflicting personalities that go into the making of a self. On the one hand, there was eternal wisdom playing with zest and energy and, on the other, Dionysus going through his nightly terrors until he raves in full-fledged madness. In most readings of the Weltalter, it is the figure of Dionysus that is highlighted. In memory of Auguste Böhmer, however, it is the figure of eternal wisdom that deserves our greatest attention. Playing off of a passage in chapter 8 of the Book of Wisdom (verses 22–30), Schelling has little lady wisdom say: “The Lord had me by his side from the beginning of his path; before he made a thing, I was already there. I was already from eternity, before the earth. Before the mountains had settled in, and the fountains flowed with water, I was the master worker (der Werkmeister) by his side. I was filled with zest (hatte meine Lust) every day and always played happily before him” (WA 31). Important here is the primordial nature of innocence and the way it works as it plays and plays as it works. It is the principle of renewal and creativity. The creation belongs to her.51 As for Caroline, she serves the role for Schelling that Beatrice served for Dante (or Gretchen served for Faust). Kept alive by love, she is the eternal muse. Instead of being forgotten (allowed to slip into the past), she is elevated into the future (or, better, she is the very image of the future), where she awaits reunification with her lover. But future, strictly speaking, is not to be understood as a time that will one 49. Jared Kenrick Nieft, “F. W. J. Schelling’s ‘Ages of the World’: Acting Out of Time” (2015). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 476. http://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd/476. 50. As stated in Schelling’s “Introduction,” “there rests the memory of all things, of their original circumstances, how they came to be and what they mean.” (WA 4) And, in the text proper: “it is above all else from within ourselves that we must recall the past. Only in this way can we uncover the first beginning from which everything else proceeded.” (WA 10) 51. In Part One of the text, wisdom shows herself as a female child (or so I read it); in Part Two of the text, we discover her again in the familiar language of the Trinity as the Son of God.